AC Milan now have exciting possibilities after the sale of Sandro Tonali, which was only agreed because the player was keen on joining Newcastle United.
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The decision to sell Tonali to the cash-rich Premier League side certain sparked a largely negative reaction from the Milan fan base, though eyebrows were raised when the figures of the deal started to come out.
Fabrizio Romano reports that it is an additional €70m deal with add-ons included, while Milan will also receive 10% of the proceeds from any future resale. It’s a record sale for Milan, while Tonali becomes most expensive Italian player in history.
Concerns remain about Milan’s project, and how the proposed RedBird ‘Moneyball’ model runs the risk of seeing the club develop into another Borussia Dortmund or RB Leipzig, given the emphasis on player trading to self-finance signings.
We asked James Horncastle from The Athletic on our latest podcast episode about how Tonali’s record-breaking move actually move came about.
“It doesn’t get agreed upon unless the player wants to go. There’s probably a player the other side of town who could go to the Premier League if he wants, with a club in more financial distress than Milan are, and that’s Nicolo Barella at Inter. And look where Barella is now: still an Inter player,” he said.
“I think that’s something you have to bear in mind, something that has got a little bit lost in the telling of this story at least in Italy. The player was up for it.
“Whether that’s because the player felt that he’d achieved a lot already with Milan, he’d won the league, he’d gone to a Champions League semi-final… in which he actually played really well. People forget amidst the chaos of that first hour that Tonali was actually pretty good in that game.
“Leao, who the club have got to sign a new contract, which for all the criticism of the ownership and the sale of Tonali, they should remember that they’ve inverted a trend here in that Donnarumma, Kessie and Calhanoglu left for nothing.
“The club has invested in Leao to get him to stay, and I would have been a lot more concerned about losing Leao as Serie A MVP than I am about losing Tonali, with the greatest respect to Tonali.
“The other player I’d say is Mike Maignan, who is for me the other most important player at AC Milan. That’s not to say the others are all expendable, but if you were to ask me which two I would want to keep the most on a desert island it would be Maignan and Leao.
“The reality is that clubs in Italy have to be pragmatic when Premier League clubs or state-owned clubs like Paris Saint-Germain come in with indecent proposals for their players.
“Because this does allow Milan to be particularly active in the transfer market and spread that money around and give the depth to Pioli that he didn’t have last season, either because he didn’t use the players at his disposal in an effective way or because the market last year wasn’t good enough.
“I’m quite excited. Even if a lot was made about Marcus Thuram missing out on Marcus Thuram, that’s because Milan still have a budget to stick to both in terms of how much they spend and what the salary cap is.
“They are the most agile team in Italy at the moment on the transfer market. All the things you read about are Milan signing Loftus-Cheek or looking to sign Pulisic, Chukwueze, Kamada… they can do all these deals if they want to at the price they believe is the right price.
“A lot of clubs in Italy at the moment can’t do anything. So in that sense, it’s one of those things where you just have to be patient and take the long view on these things.”
